You might call it lore, or a fish story, but so it goes that, once upon a time, a writer and a painter teamed up on a quest to find a magic door. While living in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina—a beautiful little town that once was home to many toymakers and woodcarvers —their (already rather unusual) lives were upended by a curious discovery: a tattered old journal lying at the bottom of a dusty, wooden box in one of the many antique shops in the area.